Footballshirtculture.com

Who doesn’t love 1970s football kits? The simple designs are a thousand times more pleasing to the eye than most modern day shirts. The site footballshirtculture.com has a very impressive page with photos and renderings of each kit from the 1978 World Cup down to the smallest details. Beautifully done.

The most surprising is what is listed as France’s “third kit” (below), which seems very unFrench. Indeed, according to the site it actually belonged to local team Kimberley FC, who lent France their shirts when as both teams had shown up with only white to wear.

It’s so hard to pick just one … I’m biased because I’ve always loved the classic Albiceleste stripes, but that Deutscher Fussball-Bund crest is amazing as well. Those and the Dutch kits have to be the best.

November 20, 2007 at 2:41 pmursus arctos

I’ve always considered that to be the definitive Albiceleste kit, and yet my aesthetic appreciation of it has always been tinged with unpleasant memories of the political context in which that World Cup was held and the whole controversy over the semi-final with Peru.

As to the Oranje, I prefer the very similar ’74 kit, if only because it provided the canvas on which Cruyff stuck his two fingers up at adidas (and thrilled his sponsors at Puma) by getting rid of one of the three stripes.

The consensus of the commenters on the site is that the ’78 World Cup was the high water mark of kit design, and there is a lot to be said for that view. By 1982, highly commercialised design elements (like the multiplicity of Admiral logos on Belgium’s curved “Coventry-style” stripes) had already begun to rear their ugly head.